linuxgeek: [LINUX_Newbies] Re: Need help with "mv" command

--- In LINUX_Newbies@yahoogroups.com, Cameron Simpson <cs@...> wrote:
>
> While grovelling in some dirt this afternoon I was thinking it is a real
> deficiency of CDROM/DVDROM burner drivers that you can't treat them like
> tapes. Tar naturally handles filling a tape, being a tape archiver, and
> it could naturally handle filling a DVD too if the things had a good
> behaviour.
>
> You _should_ be able to go:
>
> tar cvf /dev/my-dvd-drive stuff-to-archive...
>
> and have tar prompt for each new DVD in turn. You'd be burning a "raw"
> tar data stream to the DVD instead of an ISO9660 filesystem image, but
> for purposes of the OP it would work nicely, generating a sequence of
> DVDs you could label and put on the shelf, ready to extract with tar
> later.

Then when you accessed your archive you might experience the same issue a lot of tape drives did which is of course data loss due to corruption. One nice feature of optical drives is error correction. Something my Travan tape drive sorely lacked! For what DAT cost I never got involved with it, but I heard it was a lot better.

Presently there seems to be no removable storage solution that is all that swift to me compared to just buying more HDDs. For how much I like making then flipping through burnt optical discs I might as well just rm -rf everything and call it a day. But HDDs don't quite seem like removable storage solutions to me yet either.